It’s our policy not to officially (publicly) set release dates as we’ve found it causes more harm than good. For example, too many companies locked into dates will often push their software out the door when it isn’t quite ready. What this means is that you end up with lower quality software, and even then they often still delay it. Rather than go this route, we prefer to release when it’s ready. We still have a lot of internal pressure, but by going this route it allows us to delay the release of a version of LandlordMax if we don’t feel 100% confident in it. This is also why you don’t see bugs in LandlordMax!!

I’m sorry we’re the reason you’re holding back to upgrading for Leopard. Hopefully it won’t be too long until we’re able to offer a Leopard version.

We’d love to offer Snow Leopard support right away, but unfortunately we can’t because of how Java (the engine on which LandlordMax is built) is supported on the Mac OS. In detail, before Snow Leopard the Mac OS really only offered support for Java 5. There was a Java 6 installation, but it wasn’t guaranteed on all versions of the Mac OS, and it was known to be “buggy”. So we’ve been working to make sure to support Java 5.

With Snow Leopard, the Mac OS now only offers Java 6. The Java 5 installation now points to Java 6. So although they are saying it’s Java 5 supported, it’s not. The Java 5 installation is just a pointer to Java 6. So there’s no continuity, you can’t run the same version on Snow Leopard as all the other Mac OS versions!!! And as far as I understand, they have no plans to upgrade the Java version on the older Mac OS’s. What that means is that we have to support two versions of LandlordMax.

As much as we’d like to say Java 5 and 6 are the same, there are some significant differences. Enough that it’s a significant effort. Not only that, but there are several components within LandlordMax which may not work as expected with Java 6 (we still have a lot of testing to do), so we may have some additional versionning issues. Basically it’s not a small effort.

Therefore because of this, we’ve decided to go ahead and release the Mac version of LandlordMax for the Java 5 Mac OS’s (all Mac OS’s except Snow Leopard). We’re then going to start working on getting LandlordMax to work as expected with Java 6, all the while trying not to break the Java 5 version.

Which means that the Mac version of LandlordMax for all Mac OS’s except Snow Leopard will be out any day now. The Mac version for Snow Leopard will be out sometime later. I can’t give you an estimate as we don’t yet fully know what all the impacts are of working with Java 6. It’s also not just working with Java 6, but the Mac version of Java 6 and the Windows version of Java 6 are different (only the Mac OS has a different version of Java – Linux, Windows, Unix, etc. all use the same Java engine, just the Mac’s is different).

As I mentioned, we don’t yet know how long this will take, I do suspect it will take some time. Definitely more than weeks, it will very likely be in terms of months. Had the Mac OS done a continuous transition from Java 5 to Java 6, we wouldn’t be facing this issue. But they decided to make a hard break between versions, which I suspect is to save a bit of money (remember it’s the only operating system with a custom Java implementation). If you Google for this issue, you’ll find a lot of people complaining about software no longer working, software companies complaining about large upgrade efforts, etc. I can even post some of the better links if you’d like. Basically some people have been hit pretty hard.

Thanks for your time and consideration.